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Meanwhile, the demand for padded bras and breast implants, and the popularity of shows like “Mad Men,” suggest that women like a kind of reconstructed femininity. They require hips and breasts, phony or not.Many fashion designers, you may have noticed, are squeamish about breasts. They prefer boyish waif bodies or a tolerable B-cup — largely on the grounds that the clothes hang better. With obvious exceptions like the body-conscious designs of Azzedine Alaïa, their clothes very seek to neutralize the female form.
But Mr. Jacobs seldom takes the easy route. Set around a splashing fountain in a courtyard of the Louvre, his Vuitton show was called, unambiguously, “And God Created Woman,” after the 1956 Roger Vadim film starring Brigitte Bardot. From the first outfit, on the curvy model and actress Laetitia Casta, to the last, on the swimsuit legend Elle Macpherson, there was an impressive sense of the physical — corseted breasts, bare arms and legs, womanly hips under full skirts. In a way, the body was the main event.
Three designers, Miuccia Prada and Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, captured that appetite this season, and with a style that was deliberately unnatural looking. Natural would be a minimalist beige tunic or perhaps a jacket with a gently nipped waist that you could wear with a skirt or a pair of khakis. With those styles, the objective is to look purposeful and energetic. And how plenty of women would quarrel with that?
A month of ready-to-wear shows ended Wednesday with a last-minute blitz of strong collections. Jean Paul Gaultier usually finds a comfortably shallow theme for his Hermès collections, so it was no surprise that they selected the music from “The Avengers” and the bowler hats and furled umbrellas appeared on cue. Yet the tailored pantsuits and superb examples of leather coats (mostly in black) and leather-trimmed pieces expressed in depth the taste for clothes with savoir-faire.
Realistically, most of those skirts are old-fashioned and clunky to wear; you’d be exhausted before you went a block. The wool corsets would look as with a pair of pants. But to me, this collection wasn’t as much about returning to the glories of Bardot as it was about presenting an artificial and super-enlarged beauty — and where else could Mr. Jacobs go but to an era when women were still built like women, right down to their girdles?
For her Miu Miu show on Wednesday night, Miuccia Prada replaced the hard, slatted wooden chairs they typically uses with blue foam cubes. The buoyant seats, along with the ’80s dance music, were consistent with the lighter — and less conceptual — mood of the clothes.
